Sword of Vigilance

The sacred sword of Vigil and the symbol of its highest office. It is a bastard sword, ornate, and the office does not pass by blood or by vote. The sword chooses. Somewhere near twelve men and women have been Lady or Lord Vigil across the town’s hundred and twenty-five years, and each was taken up by the sword rather than the other way around. In the hand of anyone it has not chosen it is heavy and uncomfortable to hold. In the hand of the one it has, it carries no weight at all and seems to come willingly.

What is understood to be doing the choosing is Lady Eravil. The blade is spoken of not as a relic she blessed but as an acting piece of the goddess herself. Vigil’s own device says the same: a scepter that is also a bastard sword, its handle the scales of justice, the eye of Eravil at the center of it. The pairing is repeated in the temple, where her statue sits throned in a royal toga with the scepter-sword in one hand and the scales in the other. Legend goes further and holds the blade to be a single shard of metal off Eravil’s own favored weapon, handed down through champions of hers noble both as warriors and as leaders. That weapon’s name is not agreed. Some tellings call it Oath Bound; others, Oath Keeper.

Octavia was the last it chose. She was killed in a night raid (cut down by Blackguard Jack of the Tillermen, outsiders answering Vigil for taking captives, executing a magic-user among them, and returning the rest) and lies under a plain grave in the town cemetery.

Since that burial the sword has chosen nobody, and there is no precedent for it. Theresa Sarros is styled Lady Vigil and stands without it, holding the office on a name and an assessor’s training. The sword is carried by Erwin Emeric, an armored paladin who wears it across his back above his own blade and will go on wearing it until it decides. Whether Eravil is withholding a successor, or whether something else has come between, nobody at Vigil will say.